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ALiEn – a GPU-accelerated artificial life simulation program

alien-project.org

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Re: ALiEn – a GPU-accelerated artificial life simulation program

#161

Post by carbonguy »

jdonaldson wrote: post #76

Wanted to give a shot out to Larry Yeager who wrote software for this all the way back in the mid nineties : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyworld He was a professor of mine in grad school, he also did visual effects for The Last Starfighter, and the early work on character recognition in the Apple Newton. Cool dude.

Continuing the thread of other individuals who've done interesting work in this area, I've always been a huge fan of Jeffrey Ventrella's "Gene Pool": http://www.swimbots.com/genepool/

His fractal art is quite compelling as well: http://www.ventrella.com/

Re: ALiEn – a GPU-accelerated artificial life simulation program

#162

Post by eloff »

cwkoss wrote: post #140
cwkoss wrote: post #115

When I was learning to program, I tried to make a toy artificial life evolution simulation. Particle organisms on a 2D plane had 'dna' which was a list of heritable traits, like size, speed, number of offspring. Bigger organisms could eat smaller organisms, but they burn energy faster. 0 energy = death. When two organisms of opposite gender collided and had sufficient energy, they'd give some of their energy split am…

My goal with this project was to be able to seed the world with a single proto-organism and have two distinct species - one predator and one prey - evolve to create a stable ecosystem. I eventually localized food sources and added a bunch of additional rules, but was never able to realize this goal. I think for predator-prey relationships to evolve in my system it would have required sensory organs and methods to rea…

In the real world what prevents this outcome? Humans aside. Because it's uncommon. Ecosystem diversity? Pathogens?

Re: ALiEn – a GPU-accelerated artificial life simulation program

#163

Post by srer »

In no way comparable in sophistication, but I did find making an n-body simulation to be unexpectedly profound.

My universe started as a uniform random distribution of small stationary objects, the only rules that existed were gravity (F=gm1m2/r^2) and inertia (F=ma).

Mass started clumping together, orbiting each other, eventually forming a relatively stable arrangement of what we recognize as stars orbited by planets orbited by moons.

With two simple rules to govern my universe, an emergent order had occurred that mirrored my reality.

Re: ALiEn – a GPU-accelerated artificial life simulation program

#164

Post by throwaway6734 »

IkmoIkmo wrote: post #109
sooheon wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that's why my favorite way of reading him is via his short stories. Just enough to get the big idea across and not get lost in too much detail.

Could you recommend one or two of these short stories? Thank you!

It's not a short story, but this is the first work of Egan's that I read and I loved it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(novel)

Re: ALiEn – a GPU-accelerated artificial life simulation program

#165

Post by JoeDaDude »

Not sure if this is just for fun or for research. Artificial Life is/was a field of ressearch for a while, papers were written, books were published, [1][2] etc. The field sought to study biology and the complexity of living things by experimenting with simulations of the real thing(s).

This reminds me of what IMHO is best use of artificial life in a game, Unnatural Selection. In the game you had to select and breed creatures to go against other enemy creatures. [3][4]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_life

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Artificial-INSTITUTE-SCIENCES-COMPLEX...

[3] https://www.mobygames.com/game/unnatural-selection

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zteY_f9DrQA

Re: ALiEn – a GPU-accelerated artificial life simulation program

#166

Post by smusamashah »

cwkoss wrote: post #140
cwkoss wrote: post #115

When I was learning to program, I tried to make a toy artificial life evolution simulation. Particle organisms on a 2D plane had 'dna' which was a list of heritable traits, like size, speed, number of offspring. Bigger organisms could eat smaller organisms, but they burn energy faster. 0 energy = death. When two organisms of opposite gender collided and had sufficient energy, they'd give some of their energy split am…

My goal with this project was to be able to seed the world with a single proto-organism and have two distinct species - one predator and one prey - evolve to create a stable ecosystem. I eventually localized food sources and added a bunch of additional rules, but was never able to realize this goal. I think for predator-prey relationships to evolve in my system it would have required sensory organs and methods to rea…

If you managed to evolve huge organisms eating lots of small ones while both species survive than that was a predator and prey stability.

Re: ALiEn – a GPU-accelerated artificial life simulation program

#167

Post by rsiqueira »

Matumio wrote: post #141
cwkoss wrote: post #115

When I was learning to program, I tried to make a toy artificial life evolution simulation. Particle organisms on a 2D plane had 'dna' which was a list of heritable traits, like size, speed, number of offspring. Bigger organisms could eat smaller organisms, but they burn energy faster. 0 energy = death. When two organisms of opposite gender collided and had sufficient energy, they'd give some of their energy split am…

There is a 2018 paper called "The Surprising Creativity of Digital Evolution" which is a collection of similar anecdotes: https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.03453

Thanks, great paper! "Many researchers in the field of digital evolution have observed their evolving algorithms and organisms subverting their intentions, producing unexpected adaptations, or exhibiting outcomes uncannily convergent with ones in nature. Such stories routinely reveal creativity by evolution in these digital worlds."

Re: ALiEn – a GPU-accelerated artificial life simulation program

#168

Post by raldi »

cwkoss wrote: post #115

When I was learning to program, I tried to make a toy artificial life evolution simulation. Particle organisms on a 2D plane had 'dna' which was a list of heritable traits, like size, speed, number of offspring. Bigger organisms could eat smaller organisms, but they burn energy faster. 0 energy = death. When two organisms of opposite gender collided and had sufficient energy, they'd give some of their energy split am…

Decades ago I read about a simulation aiming to evolve creatures that could walk, or one day run. The fitness function that determined how many offspring you get was “maximum speed ever attained in your life”.

They let it run for a while and came back to find all the creatures had evolved into extremely tall, thin stalks that would tip over and never move again. The top would be moving very fast before it hit the ground.

Re: ALiEn – a GPU-accelerated artificial life simulation program

#169

Post by ur-whale »

Reading through the comments, the number of folks who simply can't get this running on their system seems to be fairly large.

The GPU compute ecosystem is truly in a very sorry state, and NVidia is very much to blame for this: in their quest to get a stranglehold on the market, they've reached a point where things don't even work reliably on their own products.

Re: ALiEn – a GPU-accelerated artificial life simulation program

#170

Post by borrowcheckfml »

JoeDaDude wrote: post #165

Not sure if this is just for fun or for research. Artificial Life is/was a field of ressearch for a while, papers were written, books were published, [1][2] etc. The field sought to study biology and the complexity of living things by experimenting with simulations of the real thing(s). This reminds me of what IMHO is best use of artificial life in a game, Unnatural Selection. In the game you had to select and breed…

It's still an active research area and the alife conference [0] is quite popular

[0] https://alife.org

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